Be The Firebender You Want To See In The World

August 1, 2017 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

Always wanted to be a citizen of Fire Nation? Here’s one way to ace the citizenship exam: punch-activated flaming kung fu gauntlets of doom.

As with all the many, many, many flamethrower projects we’ve featured before, we’ve got to say this is just as bad an idea as they are and that you should not build any of them. That said, [Sufficiently Advanced]’s wrist-mounted, dual-wielding flamethrowers are pretty cool. Fueled by butane and containing enough of the right parts for even a minimally talented prosecutor to make federal bomb-making charges stick, the gauntlets each have an Arduino and accelerometer to analyze your punches. Wimpy punch, no flame — only awesome kung fu moves are rewarded with a puff of butane ignited by an arc lighter. The video below shows a few close calls that should scare off the hairy-knuckled among us; adding a simple metal heat shield might help mitigate potential singeing.

Firebending gloves not enough to satisfy your inner pyromaniac? We understand completely.

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Portable Stir-Fry Range

July 30, 2017 by James Hobson 19 Comments

If you love a good stir-fry, you know that it can be a challenge to make on your stove at home. Engineer gourmet and Youtuber [Alex French Guy Cooking], in collaboration with [Make:], whipped up a portable range capable of making delectable stir-fry.

There are three major problems when it comes to cooking stir-fry: woks are typically unstable on normal burners, those burners don’t tend to heat from a center point out, and they usually aren’t hot enough. [Alex]’s 12,000BTU portable stove is great for regular applications, but doesn’t cut it when it comes to making an authentic stir-fry.

To focus the burner’s heat, he cut and bent a stainless steel baking ring into the shape of an exhaust nozzle — not unlike a jet engine — and lightly modified the range to accommodate the nozzle. He also added a larger baking ring with air flow holes for the wok to rest on. Two down, but there’s the issue of it not being hot enough.

So, why not use two butane canisters to double the output to 22,200 BTUs!

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Fire Breathing Animatronic Waterfowl, Just Because

February 3, 2016 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

Unless you’re a collector or a hunter, waterfowl decoys are pretty boring. Radio controlled decoys that can putt around are kind of cool. But a radio controlled animatronic fire-breathing decoy? That’s the very opposite of boring.

This is another one of those projects from the “Why the Hell Not?” files, and [David Windestål] is pretty clear that there’s no practical purpose for a flame-throwing, floating fowl. This doesn’t stop him from including 100-plus pictures as well as the video below in his detailed build log, and there are actually some tips to be had here. The remains of an RC racing boat that can hit 30 km/h are used for the floating gear; sadly the decoy superstructure reduces the speed by a factor of 10, so if you’re hoping for a high-performance decoy you’ll be disappointed. The rotating head and evil glowing LED eyes make up for that, though, as does the articulated beak. But the butane flame thrower, with laser-cut acrylic frame and servo flow control, really adds to the menace of the Duck from Hell. Or goose. Whatever.

As with most projects of this type, this is clearly a “do not try this at home” build, but it looks like a bunch of fun. For more ill-advised fun check out this mini RC flame thrower or the Doof warrior ukulele.

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Giving An Electric RC Plane An Afterburner

March 25, 2013 by Eric Evenchick 40 Comments

The folks at Flitetest decided to add some extra power to an electric DH.100 Vampire RC plane by adding a butane afterburner. After some testing, and a bit of fire, they were able to make it fly.

Their afterburner uses a small butane canister for fuel. A servo motor actuates the valve on the canister, forcing fuel into a tube. This tube is set up to regulate the flow of butane and ensure it vaporizes before reaching the afterburner.

At the afterburner, a circular piece of tubing with holes is used to dispense fuel, much like a barbecue. This tube is connected to one side of a stun gun’s flyback generator, and the metal surrounding it is connected to the other. The stun gun creates sparks across the gap and ignites the fuel.

With the extra components added, the landing gear was removed to save weight and the plane was given a nice coat of paint. They started it up for a test run, and the plane’s body caught fire. After some rework, they managed to take off, start the afterburner, fly around, and belly land the plane. It achieved some additional thrust, but also sounds and looks awesome.

After the break, check out a video walkthrough and demo. We promise you fire.

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SMD Soldering With Gas

July 28, 2011 by Kevin Dady 24 Comments

[desimon] had a wanted to use some accelerometer chips, but their 3x3mm 16-VFQFN packages made it pretty darn hard to solder by hand. While there are endless ways to approach this, we found this one peculiarity interesting from his use of a gas torch, though it is pretty much hot air reflow.

A PCB for the tiny devices is etched and tinned, the pads have a healthy but not overdone amount of solder applied to them. A liberal coat of flux, rough alignment of the chip and a few gentle passes from the torch and the hobby grade solder melts while the surface tension pulls everything into final alignment.

Having personally used a hot air gun a number of times (and also burning my hand about the same number of times) the localized heat of the torch does make more sense, and there is virtually no heat up time for it either, though it appears just as easy to scorch the board. It is a live flame so be careful!

Fire Horn

September 2, 2009 by James Munns 28 Comments

firehorn

Artist [Ariel Schlesinger] has managed to replace an air horn‘s compressed air tank with butane fuel. This hack manages to change the pitch of the horn slightly, as well as making one very noisy flamethrower. While not as impressive as other flamethrowers, this would probably take the cake for most achievable. Currently the site containing the how-to is down, but we would have to recommend not doing this at home anyway. Video after the jump.

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